Officials: W.H. open to NSA limits

The Obama administration opened a Senate hearing Thursday on the National Security Agency surveillance controversy by suggesting it is open to greater limits on the spy agency’s ability to use a massive database of Americans’ phone records to investigate terror threats.

Senior administration officials told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the White House might accept legislation that would rein in how broadly NSA analysts can mine the telephone data, tightening a current court-imposed limit of “three hops” — three degrees of separation removed from the telephone number being searched. With each “hop,” hundreds or even thousands of telephone numbers are rummaged through for patterns that may show contact between terrorists.

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“We would consider statutory restrictions on querying the data that are compatible with operation needs, including perhaps greater limits on contact chaining than what the current [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] orders permit,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, and Deputy Attorney General James Cole said in a “joint statement for the record,” released in connection with the hearing.

The statement also expressed a willingness to change the present five-year limit which judges have imposed on use of calling data.

“We could also consider a different approach to retention periods for the data — consistent with operational needs — and enhanced oversight and transparency measures, such as annual reporting on the number of identifiers used to query the data,” the statement added.

However, with a flurry of legislation being introduced to limit the surveillance efforts, administration officials quickly faced criticism from Senate Intelligence Committee members who said the administration has been slow to help the panel craft a bill putting additional safeguards on the snooping programs.

“The committee has been waiting on technical assistance on potential bill language,” the panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said. “We need to get this right, but we can’t do so without your assistance.”

The jawboning seemed to produce some results. Toward the end of the hearing, after the key officials had left, panel chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said she had just received on her BlackBerry legislative language from the administration to create a special counsel to advocate for privacy at the secretive FISA court.

The intelligence committee’s leaders are clearly in a rush to get their legislation into the public debate and are hoping for a panel vote next week. However, other senators aren’t waiting to put forward their proposals.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has also called for an end to the widespread collection of calling records. He has scheduled a hearing next Wednesday on the surveillance issues.

Feinstein, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters she expects a “spirited” exchange with Leahy at that session.

At Thursday’s hearing, members of the intelligence panel itself presented starkly different views of the NSA’s data gathering.

Many senators complained that media reports had distorted the agency’s surveillance efforts, particularly by suggesting that the agency is routinely listening in on Americans’ phone calls. In fact, they said, the bulk collection effort in the U.S. tracks only metadata, like phone numbers connected, time and duration of calls.

”Much of the press has called this a surveillance program. … It is not,” Feinstein declared. “People want to take out the whole system. That will leave us very vulnerable.”

However, Wyden — the Senate’s leading critic of the NSA programs — blasted them as “intrusive and constitutionally flawed.”

“The leadership of your agencies built a intelligence collection system that repeatedly deceived the American people,” he said.

Wyden suggested that the NSA continues to keep secret the scope of its domestic surveillance. He repeatedly asked Alexander whether the agency has ever collected or made plans to collect U.S. “cell site” information which indicates where a caller is at the moment of a call.

Alexander read a careful answer that was noticeably limited to the present tense. “Under Section 215 [of the Patriot Act,] NSA is not receiving cell site location data and has no current plans to do so,” he said. He added that a classified answer had been provided to Congress.